


Et in Arcadia Ego

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume I [1]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: 14th Century, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Blasphemy, Hand Jobs, Immortality, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 05:54:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wandering demigod and a fledgling vampire clash swords on the battlefield. The blood spilled between them forms a bond stronger than anything they'd ever known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Et in Arcadia Ego

**Author's Note:**

> _"I am all-powerful, it is true, but I am not immortal."_ Aramis in Ten Years Later
> 
> Aramis clearly protests too much. Once you think about it, as we did, it becomes obvious that Aramis and Athos are immortal beings, hiding in plain sight. Dumas spells it out for us again and again:
> 
>  
> 
> _Their appearance, although it was not quite at ease, excited by its carelessness, at once full of dignity and submission, the admiration of d'Artagnan, who beheld in these two men demigods, and in their leader an Olympian Jupiter, armed with all his thunders._
> 
>  
> 
> _"In that respect unlike you, my dear Aramis, for you are still the same; you have still your beautiful dark hair, still your elegant figure, still your feminine hands, which are admirably suited to a prelate."_
> 
>  
> 
> _Strange! Athos was scarcely aged at all!_
> 
>  
> 
> And so we did the sensible thing and decided to explore their divine resp. demonic nature in depth.

**Wallachia, 1394**

_I invoke you, Ares the brave, Ares the mighty, Ares the bold, enter this home - you are welcome here._

This earth is tedious. After so many centuries among men, their stink, and their swords, one would think I’d grown accustomed to it all. The endless circle of life and death. They come into this world, thinking they have new ideas to contribute, thinking they make a difference, that they _matter_. They are mistaken. All of them. The Christians, the Muslims, the Jews. They worship their One God, but forget it was their own jealous One God who said unto them “Thou shalt not worship other gods before me.”

Therein lies the paradox, doesn’t it? If there had been no other gods before Him, why the stern warning? Why bother at all? Why should the Almighty Being fear an inanimate golden calf?

Back in my day - my real day, not this darkness into which we have descended thanks to the Christians and their desire to destroy Hellenistic knowledge and with it any progress - we were closer to the gods. The gods came down and walked among men and slept among women (and, truth be told, didn’t discriminate at all). Like Zeus, my father, taking a fancy to my mother one fine day. Now _there_ was a god worth worshipping. A god who would turn himself into an eagle, a swan, or a damned _shower of gold_ (I never did let Father hear the end of this one in my day) to grasp the thing that he desired. Think of it - to become a shower of gold, that is much more respectable than this God on a Stick.

Yet, well, here I am - killing in his name. And why? Because monastic life became tiresome and the monastic stock began to spoil. It was all in good fun on Mount Athos for a few centuries, until someone decided they were going to take this whole “monasticism” rather literally, to the point where they began to neglect their appearance. I was never quite above appearance, I admit, and so I left the mountain which still bears my name and became what I am today.

A voivod in Wallachia.

_I invoke you, Ares the magnificent, Ares the enraged, Ares the bearer of swords, bring with you protection and strength._

I am thousands of years old. Not that you could tell by merely looking at me; no, I am, as one might say, well-preserved. Centuries of wandering and still, I loathe to make my way too far off from Olympus, otherwise who knows how long it may take to restore me. Oh, I too am mortal, my demi-divinity never quite shielding me entirely from death. But were you to take my remains to Mount Olympus and pour proper libations upon them with the correct invocation, and I am returned back to life, restored to full strength, and all my memories intact. Thousands of years worth of memories.

It is a loophole and one I’m happy to exploit. Not that I couldn’t see myself happy with the other demigods and heroes in Elysium. Wrestling with Hercules, racing with Achilles. The memory of Achilles is a bittersweet one for me, but Patroclus wasn’t the sharing kind, and I, for one, respected their bond. But why should I dwell below with, as Achilles (via Homer) puts it, the breathless dead, when I could be a god among mere mortals, spilling with my own hand the sacrificial blood that transforms into ambrosia down below?

_Ares the victorious, Ares the defeated, Ares the captured, grant me virility and control._

The job of a voivod is never done - otherwise they wouldn’t call it “voivod.” One who conducts war, to be exact. An evocative word. I’ve grown quite fond of the Slavic languages, as well as the Slavic people. They appreciate libations, if only to sacrifice them to their own gullet. As for the minor warlords and boyars, always at each other’s throats, well, it’s more of a pleasure than a chore for me to engage in these skirmishes, and my people admire my apparent youthful exuberance. The pride I take in precise slaughter. I do try to elevate it to an artform, whenever possible. 

War is my only mistress, I take no other. Hera’s curse still pursues me across centuries. That spiteful hag. 

I do wish sodomy wasn’t so woefully out of style. In my day, we didn’t even have a _word_ for it. Sodomy. Sodom. Gomorrah. How trite, to be bogged down with such frivolities, I, who marched with Alexander upon Persia, who sat at the very Symposium before it was Plato’s _Symposium_. Oh, how my soul still cries out at the barbarism of the destruction of Alexandria!

But I digress. I do that - it is unavoidable when you have thousands of years worth of memories attempting to be contained in one human-sized skull. Where was I? Ah yes, the slaughter.

_Ares the lover, Ares the beauteous, Ares the beloved, let me walk boldly through laughter._

Our swords clashed upon the battlefield like Zeus’ own thunderbolts. He moved with such speed and agility, striking out at me with such feral ferocity, that for a moment I almost allowed him to run me through, so stricken was I with the beauty of his death-dance. All of Mircea’s men were untrained plebeians at best, who may as well have armed themselves with broomsticks instead of swords. But this one, young though he was, moved with remarkable skill. I could not make out his face, hidden as it was beneath a cloak. I wondered how he could see at all, perhaps by senses other than sight. I blocked another powerful blow and pivoted to deliver a kick straight into the solar plexus. My partner in combat staggered backwards, but came back at me with redoubled furor, grinning as if each one of my counterattacks was giving him acute pleasure. Perhaps he had been possessed by the Furies.

“You fight well for a peasant, kitten,” I couldn’t help but taunt my assailant.

His sabre was immediately at my throat, parried only by my uncanny ability to contort into surprising positions. Still, he had almost gotten the drop on me. I had to drop to the ground and roll backwards out of yet another spirited attack, one that missed my skull by a mere hair. 

“And you for an old man,” he hissed, more a wildcat than the boy he appeared to be.

At first, I thought I might just dispatch him, as I did his fellow skirmishers. But by the time I had blocked a dozen of his thrusts while he diverted a separate dozen of my own fruitless attacks, I was beginning to really enjoy myself. The kid presented a rare challenge. Perhaps his strength had been demonic. Perhaps he was another demigod, much like myself, although the latter seemed unlikely since most of my demibrethren were long gone and their bloodlines diluted.

At last, my blade found flesh, tearing through an opening in cheap armor just above his hip. I drew blood, which gave me pause because demons didn’t bleed, yet he was too fast, too strong to have been a mere man. The sly fox had taken advantage of my moment of disillusionment and struck out at me in his own turn, his blade tearing into my shoulder. I staggered back, more stunned than hurt, but didn’t let my sword drop. Instead, I transferred it to my left hand and took another swing at the little demon.

“Devil take you, you little imp,” I grunted as I attacked him again. But this was truly beginning to vex me. “Why don’t you just die so I can get back to my drinking?”

I managed to knock the sabre out of his hand with a decisive blow. Most men weren’t skilled enough to handle a left-handed assault. He laughed, baring his teeth at me. For a moment, I thought they were almost too pearly and definitely too sharp to reside in a mouth of a Wallachian warmonger. I was just about to run him through, pin him to the ground once and for all, when he rushed me, knocking me back onto my haunches, and sat astride me as if I was some kind of a stallion for him to break.

I flushed with heat at the impact of our bodies connecting, a jolt of pleasure shooting through me despite my mortal predicament. And then, he did the most extraordinary thing. He tore my sleeve off. The entire, blood-soaked sleeve from my right arm. And in a flash, he was gone, disappearing in a cloud of dust off the field of battle, as if he had never existed.

***

_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._

I kiss the cross as I rise from my knees. I always kiss the cross as I rise from my knees. It burns on my lips.

I don’t know to whom I kneel.

I don’t know to whom I kneel, yet kneel I must, with my head bent and my hands clasped around the rosary that Popă Alexandru gave me before his death. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t bend my knees and my head to something greater and more powerful than myself. In the monastery where I was educated ever since I was nine years old, I was taught to kneel with my head bent, was taught to prostrate myself, to ask for divine guidance and mercy, to pray for redemption and forgiveness to God the Father, to the Almighty, the Omniscient, the Eternal. He knew of my transgressions, he knew my deepest darkest secrets and fears.

Or so they told me.

How many years has it been since Popă Alexandru died? I’ve lost count. I think it might be one hundred years, and it might be longer. Years pass differently now than they used to when I was young. The circle of life and death grinds on and on and on, years slip away just like rosary beads slip through my fingers: each one the same as the one before and as the next one, and the next. Humans assign different prayers to them in their desperate attempt to render them distinct, to create the illusion that each one matters; that you must not skip one, because He will know, watching you, watching your sins and omissions. In the same way they imagine that the passing years matter as they speed past them, faster and faster, and they fill those years with toils and struggles that are meant to bring them closer to God. They are not aware that you can skip a year, a decade, I daresay even a century, and it will not make a difference. Not to you, not to the world, and certainly not to God for whom there is only one time, and that time is eternity.

_Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem cæli et terræ, visibilium omnium et invisibilium._

When did I begin to question the teachings that had guided me since boyhood? When, I whisper sometimes, in the deepest, quietest hour or the night, when did I lose my faith?

Was it when I first woke after the carnage on the battlefield, my armour hacked off me, flies feasting on the rancid blood that dried on my tunic?

Was it when I first drew blood of a man who had mocked the little monk who stood between him and his conquest?

Was it when I woke again and again, blood clinging to my mouth, my skin and clothes, trapped in that eternal circle of life and death? I tasted eternity then, and its taste was that of blood.

The God of Israel. The God of Abraham. The God of Moses. The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful God, a jealous God. He is proud and unrelenting, and He smites those who dare cross him.

More than anyone else, I have been created in His image. I, too, am eternal. I, too, am all-powerful. The sabre lies in my hand like the sword in the hand of the Cherub. I am Uriel. I am Michael. Quis ut Deus? I too wield my sabre like a cleansing flame. It burns into my enemies and I feel the heat of their scorched flesh and their boiling blood run all the way up my arm and erupt in my chest and my loins. This is when their blood is the sweetest: when it’s heated beyond human endurance, when it’s threatening to come bursting through their skin, when it’s pumping life and rage and fear into the throbbing muscles of their arms and legs, clouding their vision in a red mist and turning them into beasts who live to tear me apart with their teeth and claws of iron. They think they are killing in His name, the fools. It is my arm that He guides, lending me strength to smite them and grind them to dust.

_Et in unum Dominum Iesum Christum, Filium Dei unigenitum, et ex Patre natum ante omnia sæcula. Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, genitum non factum, consubstantialem Patri; per quem omnia facta sunt._

Or was it when I was killed?

Did my faith abandon me when my life drained from me in an endless stream of blood after the man who had mocked the little monk and whom I had challenged to a duel had run me through with his sabre? He stood above me, then, hand on his hip, and his mouth gaped like a black abyss with breathless, giddy laughter.

He didn’t laugh when I came to him that night. His mouth gaped like a black abyss again, but it wasn’t with laughter. It was the wordless, noiseless terror that grips mortals in the face of the dead.

Fear had rendered his blood sweeter than honey as it poured into my mouth through the wound in his neck. He didn’t struggle, he barely breathed. My hand was on his chest, and I felt the beat of his heart fade away with every swallow that I took. It was easy. I had never known how easy it would be, I had never done anything like that before. But then, I had never before died.

Did I feel changed? I don’t know. I went back to my monastery the next day, determined to take my vows now that the man who had mocked me had been punished. They sent me away. It wouldn’t do, the scandal was too great; the man who had killed me was a kinsman of Theodore Laskaris himself. I can see Popă Alexandru’s face even now, and his eyes are full of sorrow and regret as he gazes up at me. He touched his fingers to my forehead, blessing me with the sign of the cross as if he was baptising me, and I heard him invoke the name of a demon with his last breath: “Simara,” he whispered. “Aramis”. His blood was nothing like molten honey: it turned into vinegar in my mouth.

Popă Alexandru had taught me about the likes of me.

Resurgents, risen from the dead and condemned to walking this earth like the Wandering Jew. Descendants of the pagan godlings and idols who dwelled in the roots of trees, in the depths of the Eastern forests; who lurked in the shadows and crevices between day and night, between life and death. A mother who bore one child when two had been conceived in her womb would give birth to one like me, one with two souls: one Christian, one pagan, both _craving_.

I cannot be killed, I am dead already. I am the resurrection, albeit not the life.

_Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est._

I am one of those revenants of Hungary, of Livonia or Wallachia of whom you might have heard. I am meant to wander restless between sunset and dawn, hiding in my grave at cock-crow. Yet I never had a grave when I was first slain. My body was never found, I never received a burial in hallowed ground. Is this the reason why I am different? The dead are repugnant to the living, yet I am anything but. I’ve seen women look at me. They used to look at me before my death, at the young, fresh-faced novice who would read to them _The Lives of the Saints_ and who would go down on his knees before them until they invoked the name of our Lord. And they look at me now. There is something knowing in their eyes when they smile at me, and I smile back. My habit has served me well for many decades: the wandering monk can knock on every door, especially one as young and pretty as I am. They invite me into their homes, and I repay them for their hospitality. I never defile the innocent, and my mouth is adept at bringing pleasure as much as at bringing death.

I don’t drain women of blood. Their hearts are not filled with terror nor rage when I approach them. They smile and cajole; they open their arms and hearts to me, and I cherish them.

No, it is the men whom I seek when hunger drives me to hunt. I shed my habit and don my hauberk and I stand on the battlefield, tasting the air until I find a scent that sets my body aflame. I follow it, slashing my way through the swell of bodies, my own body singing in ecstasy by the time I reach my quarry. His last breath and his last blood are mine.

Sometimes men come to me willingly. They smile at me in the same way as the women do, and I cherish their smiles just the same. I will never forget the liberating, exhilarating joy when a man crouched down on his hands and knees before me for the first time, his forehead almost touching the ground, as if he was praying in the Oriental fashion. The moan that escaped his throat when I drove into him was like a prayer. His vertebrae were like the beads of a rosary under my fingers as my hand moved up his spine, pushing his hair aside at the nape of his neck. I sank my teeth into him, gently, I didn’t want to hurt him. My heart was brimming over with gratitude for the gift he made me as I drank from him and sodomised him. They call it a sin. They don’t know how alive, how gloriously alive it makes you feel.

The cross of the rosary I got from Popă Alexandru burns my lips, but it doesn’t hurt. It gives me strength, it invigorates me, it rushes to my head and sends my blood pumping to my heart and loins.

_Amen._

I sniffed at the sleeve I had torn from my enthralling challenger’s arm that day. It smelled like nothing I’d ever encountered before, and I pressed it to my lips and touched the fabric with the tip of my tongue. Instantly, my head spun and I sank down to my knees, overcome with a surge of lust so potent it threatened to undo me then and there.

Finding him was easy. The trail of his scent weaved and meandered through the camp like a silver thread. I snuck into the tent where he lay asleep, gliding past the sentinels like a ghost. Somewhere, a dog barked, but its growls turned into whimpers, and it curled its tail between its legs and retreated into the shadows.

His groom was lying fast asleep in the outer compartment of his tent. I moved past him, swiftly, impatiently, because the delicious scent was calling out to me, calling out to my blood. The pulse in my neck, in my groin was as powerful as the tide, making my skin tauten and bulge in turn. I slid astride him even before I knew how I had crossed the distance to his cot. His hips slotted between my legs like they had done on the battlefield, as if it was their rightful, god-given place. I leaned in to take him in with my eyes and my mouth in all his glory. The sight of him was almost as overwhelming as that scent that was steaming off him in heady clouds, like vapour in a Turkish bath. His features were not those of a feral warlord. With his straight nose and the fine lines of temple, brow and cheekbone, he resembled a Roman sculpture rather than a mortal man. His hands, I noted, were those of a warrior: exquisitely shaped, with long fingers and delicate wrists, they were marred and callused and altogether criminally neglected. And then the throat, oh, the throat! An ivory length of reverberating flesh, filled to the brim with that fragrant, potent liquid that I craved. This was it, the moment for which I lived. For his blood to unfold its bouquet, it had to be spiked with terror and rage. I had to arouse him before I devoured him, had to make his body buck under me like a wounded stallion in the agony of death. Regret shot through me, regret at killing something so exquisite. I didn’t have to kill them when I drank from them, but I knew with this one I would not be able to control myself.

Leaning over him, so closely that my hair trailed over his chest, I moved my hands from his shoulders to his throat in a lethal caress. I was so close, so close, yet I hesitated, willing time to stand still in this one perfect moment.

He bucked: a hard thrust of his groin between my thighs. Hands on my hips, dark eyes staring straight into my souls, and a voice dripping into my ear like molten honey. “What have we here?”

***

The battle won, I have given thanks to Ares and his sister Eris, she whose warlike thighs had wrapped around me so long ago to invoke Hera’s curse. Where are they now, my Gods who kissed and cursed with the same lips, whose hands gave pleasure and wrought havoc with singular purpose? I shall never see her again.

My familiar - called by a different name in different times - my servant, my body slave, my serf, my domestic. In a word: Grigoriy. He’s down for the count having served me my mead and bread. When I am finally departed this mortal coil, he will be the one to take my ashes to Olympus and guide my soul home to a new vessel from the Stygian shores.

My shoulder had been tended to and didn’t bother me much except to serve as a reminder of my carelessness. But my head ached, for I am not beyond human suffering, which only made me drink more. The medicinal tonic, brought to us by the honeybee itself, how could it be anything but curative? Bees, from the hills of Delphi to the waves lapping at the rocks of Rhodes, known as the insect that bridges the natural world and the underworld, the physical and the spiritual. And had I been Agamemnon’s son instead of the son of Zeus, they would’ve laid me down in a beehive in Mycenae and there I would have remained. But like the bee itself, my soul flies back here, to this world full of mortal mysteries.

Such as the incubus currently pressing his thighs around my hips. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I saw him smile, and even in the darkness of my tent, I recognized his teeth. No doubt, he had come to finish the job left undone upon the battlefield. He was in for a nasty surprise.

My thumbs fit perfectly into the grooves of his hips, as if his bones had been shaped for my hands, and pulled him closer. “What have we here?” 

My hands slid from his hips and wrapped around his wrists, seemingly so delicate that the press of my fingers might break them. He startled and bristled in my grasp. For a moment, I had the distinct feeling that I was trying to hold on to a bat beating its wings. At this striking imagery, I let go of his wrists and grabbed on to his hair instead, flipping him over and pinning his body with my own.

“What are you?” he hissed. Funny, he didn’t have the skin of a serpent, but something about the way his body writhed underneath mine had a distinct snakeline quality.

I could examine him better this way, my hand still holding him by his flowing curls so that his neck was exposed and his facial features were colored by the permeating moonlight. And perhaps an inner light too, for it was unlikely that Mistress Moon would have penetrated my tent.

“I think, a better question, little chyortik, would be what in the devil’s name are _you_ , hmm?” My face was close to his, close enough to see his dark eyes glowing like cinders in the darkness. “And what are you doing here?”

He didn’t respond, but his gaze traveled to the column of my throat. It’s been a long time since I’d seen pure _hunger_ like that in anyone’s eyes. I shifted my hips and confirmed my suspicion that indeed, yes, he was rock solid underneath me. I suppose a different man might have been embarrassed, but my own body responded in kind at this discovery. “Chyort vozmi!” I swore in Russian. Devil take it, indeed. The little demon certainly was having an effect on me.

“Let me drink from you,” he said, fingers alighting upon my neck. “You can kill me after. You’re strong enough, I can tell.”

He was lying. I have no idea how I knew that, but I was certain of it at the time. The little incubus lied. His lips, so close to mine that I could almost taste them (they would taste like distilled jasmine liqueur), were parted in a sigh of surrender, but dripped lies. 

He too was a honeybee, trapped between this world and the next. And I could tell he wanted to sting.

My insubordinate prick gave a little jolt at the idea and I lost my grip upon his locks. His head shot up that instant and his lips pressed against mine, floral sweetness filling my tastebuds and nostrils. Could demons truly taste that way? His kiss had been ambrosia returning me to my Olympic roots. I sighed, feeling his legs wrapping around my own, his fingers gripping at the spaces in between my ribs.

“Little incubus, don’t..,” I began, prying our mouths apart, much to my own regret. His lips traveled from my mouth along my jaw, tongue lapping against my earlobe like an agreeable puppy. I pressed him closer, shutting my eyes. It had been too long, and his body fit all too well into my embrace.

“Let me taste you,” he insisted, hot breath against my skin summoning my veins to the surface. My treasonous body was helpless to resist him, even as my higher brain told me this was a creature to be slain, not to lay with.

His fingernails cut angry half-moons into the skin of my back. My shirt had been rancid. I could not in all honesty recall the last time I had had proper ablutions. It was impossible that he should want me, yet here he was, begging for it, pinned underneath me on my solitary cot, panting for it as if I was Apollo incarnate.

I reached a hand in between us, palming against his hardness, the twin to my own, the cloth against him so thin that I could feel the veins in the tumescent flesh with my calloused fingers. He gasped and bucked up into my hand.

“You want me, little chyortik?” I asked, teasing him with the pad of my thumb through the cloth.

“Please!” he begged, fangs flashing like diamonds in the black of the night. 

I had no more doubts that they were merely a drink-induced hallucination. With my free hand, I forced his mouth open as I liberated his swollen cock from the confines of the cloth. For a moment he seemed frenzied, almost helpless, as I slotted our cocks together and moved against him. His fangs rested gently against my knuckles as he sucked on my fingers.

“You’re driving me mad,” I muttered, burying my face in his neck, my lips finding the curves of his collarbones and mouthing at them with unexpected reverence. He was too beautiful to have been real.

One of the incubus’ fangs broke skin as he sucked on the pad of my middle finger and emitted a moan so loud and filthy, I half-expected Grigoriy to come fumbling in to check on me at any moment. His hand was suddenly on the back of my neck, even as I loomed over him, hovering somewhere between this world and the next. I wanted him. I wanted to have him and die. Possibly forever.

He pulled me closer and I went easily that time, cock sliding wetly against cock trapped in the vise of my fist, my neck pressed against his mouth, against his fangs. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I wanted him to do it. I wanted him to drink my blood.

***

He wasn’t afraid. That was, perhaps, the most frightful aspect about him. I have known strong men; I have known men who overpowered me, one had even succeeded in killing me. Yet I could always feel unholy terror sleet off them as they sensed my true nature.

This one knew what I was, and yet I tasted no fear. His pulse heaved desperately with every throb of his blood, and all that I could sense as I pressed my lips and teeth against the parchment-fine skin of his neck was desire. Ancient, marrow-deep desire, the weight of which was smothering me like his body smothered mine. I wasn’t scared, either, there was no place for fear in my heart. I had thought his scent overwhelming; that was before I had known his touch. He could have killed me on the spot and I would not have tried to fight him. As long as he granted me a sip of that nectar that was calling out to me from within his veins, I would gladly die. Possibly forever.

He turned his head, his breath brushed like a swallow’s wing against my temple, and he pressed his neck against my mouth. His hand clenched around us both and I hissed. “Do it,” he breathed, or perhaps I only imagined it, because the rush of blood was so that my ears felt like they were filled with flax. I closed my eyes and grazed his skin with the tips of my teeth. Above me, he shuddered and buckled, and he rammed his hips into mine, and that one thrust told me how powerful his loins were. My nails were digging into his bare back; unlike the wounds in his neck, those welts would not heal by the morrow, unless I lapped at them as I would always lap at bite-marks. But no, I wanted him to bear my marks. If he lived (please, oh Almighty Father, I pray thee like I haven’t prayed in a century: grant me control; grant me restraint; do not let me kill him, not him), _if_ he lived, I wanted him to carry the stigmata of our communion on his body.

Suddenly, his weight withdrew and I whimpered in agony and seized a fistful of his hair. But I should not have worried: his desire for me was too great to permit him to leave unfulfilled. He merely lifted himself off me to straddle me like a colt he was meaning to break. Pressing my thighs together with his, he shoved his prick between them in one endless, moist slide. My own cock twitched against his stomach and my hips jolted to meet his. A sting in my side reminded me of the wound he had bestowed on me that day, but all was forgotten the moment my mouth was back on his throat. His pulse beat against my lips, between my legs, against my cock, a holy trinity that I was willing to venerate for the rest of my life.

I pulled him down by his hair and dug my teeth into his neck, tearing through his jugular vein with ease. Liquid life gushed forth and exploded in my mouth. A stream of sunlight. Nectar of the gods. The blood of the covenant. A potion the likes of which I had never tasted before, and my senses swam away from me as our Eucharist sent me into a frenzy of hunger and lust.

He rode me ferociously as I drank him, fucking himself between the flesh of my thighs, and I clung to him, my conqueror and my salvation. His release filled my mouth and my nostrils, his blood turning to spice even before he spent himself with a filthy groan and a bruising thrust between my legs.

A soft touch to my lips reanimated me as I lay in a half-swoon. He was raising himself on trembling arms and I saw him press his fingers to the wound on the side of his neck. He glanced at them and carried them to his mouth and I watched his tongue flick out and lick off his own blood. “Is this what you want from me, little chyortik?” he asked in the tone of voice that had even now grown familiar: teasing yet oddly reverend. He was sitting back on his haunches and as I followed his movement with my eyes, my gaze fell on his cock, still half-hard and pointing at me like a pike, and then on my own which lay curled in a drying puddle on my stomach. So full had my senses been of him, I had not noticed my own release.

A sudden panic gripped me, and I darted upright, pushed him off, pulled my clothes around me and dashed into the night with my cloak spread behind me like the wings of a nocturnal bird of prey.

***

My bat had flown into the night rousing my familiar from sleep. He muttered something about ‘brazen hussies’ before resuming his soft snores of repose. I contemplated thrashing him for a moment, for a good guard dog he most certainly was not. Still, loyalty mattered more to me than competence. Competence could be taught, but loyalty was something you were born to.

My body felt too overwrought to move. I pressed my hand to the punctures in my neck and wondered whether a surgeon should be sent for to tend to this new wound. I smiled as my hand wrapped around my own neck. Oh, this new wound ran a lot deeper than just a tear in my neck. I felt as if an unseen part of me was still reaching out to him, as if he bound us together with an invisible thread that he had forgotten to rend before departing. 

My heart beat at a different pace now and it wasn’t from the loss of a great volume of blood. I relived the past moments in my mind, burying my face in the perspiration-soaked pillow that now bore more of his scent than of my own. I bit down onto the fabric to stifle my moan. I had been alone for so long, for too long, never finding that one, that friend who could make me feel every kind of love.

My people have four words for what men in this place and time call simply “Love.” _Storge_ \- στοργή - the familial love, one I might have felt for my Father had he not been the All Father, one I shall never feel for another mortal for Hera’s curse makes offspring an unlikely outcome. _Philia_ \- φιλία - we can thank Aristotle for this one, this love between equals, the love of true friendship, this love that asks for nothing but to exist. _Eros_ \- ἔρως - named for the God of love whose golden arrows even today are an unsubtle symbol of his prowess, the love one feels for one’s lover, Erastes to Eromenos, Zeus to Ganymede. And finally, Agape - ἀγάπη- the higher love, altruistic love, unconditional love, or to the Christians - the love of God for man or man for God (although we true gods and demigods know this to be a cruel joke).

My Ganymede. You flee from me, but if I must turn myself into an eagle as my Father once did, I will swoop down upon you and carry you off in my talons yet. I will find you by Ariadne’s thread with which you have bound us and I will tell you my name, my true name: Athos - Aθως. I will speak the soft Theta, a sound nonexistent in the Slavic languages, the sound of the waves of the Aegean sea.

***

The tonic that flowed through his veins animated my mind, my muscles and my senses, in short: my entire body so that I felt I would never have to sleep again. Snagov, to where the remnants of Mircea’s defeated army had retreated, was a week’s ride away, and I had neither slept nor eaten on the journey thither. I had not washed, either, longing to keep my lover’s scent on me for as long as possible. By the time we reached the town, I could not put off my ablutions any longer. Growing up in a monastery with a large bathhouse, I had been accustomed to cleanliness ever since boyhood, cleanliness of body as well as of soul. My soul was lost, I knew that, but I could still take care of my body.

The banya steamed around me as I reclined on the wooden bench, watching sweat pearl on my chest and stomach and run down into the hair on my groin. I had chosen the time well, I was alone in there and could lose myself in most agreeable thoughts. Had he been there with me, I pondered as I closed my eyes and tilted my head back against the boards, I would wash him; starting with his feet, like Our Lord Jesus washed the feet of his Disciples. Moving up, I would press my lips to the inside of his thigh, where blood pounds the strongest. I would savour its intoxicating fragrance even through his skin. My fingers groped for the piece of cloth which I had torn from his sleeve eight days ago and I buried my face in it. The scent of his blood was still powerful enough to send my head reeling.

I would anoint him with tallow, as was the custom, and my fingers would glide and slide easily over his slippery skin, kneading the powerful muscles that made up his body from his shoulders all the way down to his calves. And then – my hips jolted at the image – a young reed appeared in my hand and I lashed him across the back. The marble skin flushes under the lashes, which are coming quicker and harder now, and he is writhing and begging me to stop. Begging me for more. His head is spinning, his body is pliant before me, and I halt in my torturous ministrations, lay him out in the moss outside and kneel behind him to bury myself in that-

I groaned and my body tautened, treacherously and much too soon. My body, I knew, was still that of a young man, not yet twenty years of age, even though I had walked this earth for a century. I had barely touched myself, my waking dreams and the blood-soaked talisman had been enough. When I opened my eyes again, I saw the traces of my emissions splattered over my stomach and chest. Would he, I wondered suddenly, wiping myself clean, find the taste of me as heady as I found his?

Even though the filth that clung to my souls could not be eradicated, the cleansing ritual of prayer had never ceased to give me comfort. As I knelt on the flagstones in the chapel, with my head bent and my rosary clasped between my hands, I rejoiced in the peaceful _nihil_ that filled my mind and my heart. Ever since I first died, I had felt nothing when walking on hallowed ground. Once I set foot into a church, my mind was blank and darkness poured into my skull. I cowered in that darkness, and it took me under its wings, shielding me from my own thoughts and feelings – impenetrable, soothing, eternal. Death had been the same. Ten years or more I had been dead, slain by a cunning adversary’s hand, and as I’d lain in the ground, there had been nothing. I had felt my own rebirth, tiny pinpricks of light that began to flicker amidst the void as I’d grown stronger and stronger, until I had regained enough vigour to burst out of my grave and claw my way back to the surface.

Tiny pinpricks of light began to erupt in my mind now, and then – footsteps. I didn’t raise my head. I knelt, with my head bent and my rosary clasped between my hands, and my heart shuddered in my breast. It pounded against the torn piece of cloth that lay against my bare skin under my shirt and tunic.

He stood next to me, and the darkness in my mind dispersed under light that was nothing short of divine: it was the light that had blinded Saul on the road to Damascus.

“Who are you?” he asked quietly.

“Aramis,” I gave the name without thinking: the name that Popă Alexandru had called me, a mirrored distortion of the demonic ‘Simara’.

Who. Who, not what.

“You are not an incubus,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met someone like you before. Where are you from?”

“From here.”

“How long have you been around?”

I shrugged. “One hundred years? I don’t know exactly, I… was dead for a while. And then I came back, and I lived again.”

Silence fell. I could sense his presence, even though he didn’t speak, and he didn’t even appear to move. “So young,” he said wistfully. And just like that, there was warmth, his hand on my nape, under my hair, finger and thumb pressing into the pulse points either side of my neck.

“Come with me.” So quiet, his words were barely more than a breath. A gentle supplication, nothing like the summoning of a demon. “I can teach you-”, he laughed softly. “I can teach you many things.” He sank to his knees by my side and, quite serious again, unclasped my hands, threaded his fingers through mine and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist, as if striving to feel the life in my veins. “I can teach you this.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Guide To Grossness Vol I – Things You Never Wanted To Know About The Disgustoids](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7226494) by [Favourite_alias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Favourite_alias/pseuds/Favourite_alias)




End file.
